Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 9 of 11

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow, Black and Gray, painted in 1922. 

Known as a grid work, Mondrian’s iconic artworks, composed of only primary colours and distinct black lines, like window frames, have been so frequently referenced and copied, they’re almost an emblem, an icon of modernism. Influencing pop culture from fashion and design through to Miffy, Dick Bruna’s picture-book rabbit.

But within this composition of pure, plain colour and palest grey, lies a utopian ideal. 

Mondrian, who was Dutch, had a Puritan upbringing and began his artistic career painting in a traditional, figurative style. And he was among a group of painters who lived and worked in The Hague in the late 19th Century, influenced by the French Realists. But after the turn of the century, Mondrian experimented with many of the avant garde styles developing out of Paris. Fauvism, Cubism, and he became more and more interested in spirituality. In particular, the movement called Theosophy. 

By 1917, the First World war was raging and a group of Dutch artists, including Mondrian, formed De Stijl (The Style). Their aim? To create an international art movement, that strived for a peaceful world through one simple channel of beauty and harmony, and Mondrian was filled with ideas about how and why this style could exist.  

His essays in De Stijl’s periodic journal laid out a theory: ‘Neo-plasticism’, which he believed expressed the clarity and unity that were achieved when opposing forces are set in balance.

 Red… blue… yellow… black… grey …and white. 

A basic colour palette contained within even more basic shapes. In this painting, you can see how meticulously he painted each.

Once his aesthetic had been refined, Mondrian remained committed to creating pure abstract paintings, composed of black lines of varying thickness, with squares and rectangles in primary colours and large swathes of areas painted white. De Stijl also branched out into architecture and furniture design. Mondrian’s own living space was a white, minimalist room with black lines and coloured geometric shapes on the walls. It wasn’t fashion. But rather, represented his beliefs and was deeply connected to his spiritual state. 

Mondrian’s legacy would be not just his own enduring visual language, but the next age of Abstract art.